So why on earth did we create ImpressPages CMS?

“Don‘t make your own CMS” is a piece of advice you may often hear from senior developers and alike. Well, back in the days we were a small web design firm ourselves, and our customers disagreed. Though we liked WordPress and Drupal, those were too tricky for non-IT people.

ImpressPages team

Some years ago most of our current team co-founded an unpretentious web design agency called Apro Media. Our customers were mostly small and medium companies that needed working, nice looking and user friendly websites. The business was good, we were delivering and, most importantly, making our clients satisfied. Sadly though, only until their marketing guys got to adding new content, let alone new features. So we started working on a customer-centric CMS that non-tech people would feel comfortable with. Eventually, it turned into a full fledged product we call ImpressPages today.

Smart simplicity

We realized that any customer with at least some content management experience is firstly interested in usability and intuitiveness. They want publishing content to be as simple as writing an email.

For this reason, we came up with features such as drag&drop and inline editing. In a sense, we made publishing new content on a corporate website easier that posting something on Facebook! Believe it or not, our customers sent us flowers for this.

Not forgetting the devs

We were developers who loved to code, and a web agency that needed efficiency at the same time. We discovered that popular CM systems were designed firstly with bloggers, designers or e-shops in mind. Probably those systems grew too big to be flexible enough…

As a web design firm, we just needed a flexible CMS that would be easy to expand with plugins, as well as a simple and efficient layout, nice SEO options and responsiveness. So we worked on it on top of user friendliness we mentioned above.

What the future holds

However, what really inspired us to proceed with ImpressPages as a standalone product was seeing it starting to shape a community. Being open source always helps, yet we love seeing others make real use of our values.

And so we have amazing new features on the agenda that we hope will help our community grow even further: a theme marketplace is already in closed beta and we’re working hard on a plugin market! We have introduced a flexible revenue sharing scheme that allows you to choose how many we should get from your theme (and soon – plugin) sales. We are sure these innovations will bring even more creative individuals into our wonderful community.

We also believe the cloud is the future of web design, which makes managing websites even easier, so we’re also working on it! We see ourselves as a platform and as a future way of creating and managing websites, which means there will be many more exciting features and news from us. Stay tuned!

Who’s making all this

Web design fans just like you :) Our vision is foreseen by Audrius, a huge fan of HTML5, CSS3, web standards, simplicity and clean code. His values make ImpressPages the best place to work at for our developers Mangirdas and Algimantas. Their lines of beautiful code turn into beautiful user interfaces when our designer Mindaugas is at hand. A perfect storm to inspire Marijus, our technical writer :)